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supply aid to the poorest, Canada’s rulers are more interested in corporate brand ing and in plunder for private profit in the third world. This is the agenda be hind Stephen Harper’s much ballyhooed aim to shift economic activity abroad from the faltering United States, to Africa, Asia and Latin America. Canadian foreign direct investment is now $25 billion in developing countries.
The Star’s editorial preference for bal ancing “Canadian interests without sacri ficing our commitment to the very poor est” seems to carry very little weight on Bay Street.
To defeat this aspect of the corporate agenda, unions should step up indepen dent working-class political action and mobilize aggressively against the capi talist austerity drive. Apparently, the re treat by union bureaucrats over the past 30 years has not sated the appetite of the ruling class.
Teachers refuse givebacks Secondary school teachers at two southern Ontario school boards voted down local tentative agreements compli ant with the terms of Draconian provin website: http://socialistaction.ca cial legislation. Law 115, outrageously titled the “Putting Students First Act,” im poses a two-year wage freeze and cuts to sick leave benefits. It enables the Educa tion Minister to halt teacher strikes and make sure any locally negotiated agree ments are “substantially identical” to the Ontario Liberal government’s austerity terms.
Ontario Secondary School Teachers’
Federation (OSSTF) officials reached concessionary deals with York and Ni agara school boards, but teachers there rejected the deals, and gave a defiant middle finger to Law 115’s general as sault on free collective bargaining and the right to strike.
To avoid further embarassment, OSSTF bureaucrats cancelled tentative agree ment votes at other boards.
Elementary school teachers are plan ning walk-outs in December. Their Sec ondary panel colleagues may follow suit. The questions remain: when Education Minister Laurel Broten orders teachers back to work and imposes terms and conditions, will teachers stay out? Will they be joined by other public-sector workers now suffering under the lash of austerity? n both climate-change believers and deniers (mostly Fox news pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh).
However, the evidence is undeniable.
Balog was a skeptic until he decided to photograph and check out for him self the regression of the glaciers.
During several arduous treks, he and a small team set up special time-lapse cameras on several continents to pho tograph changing glaciers over sever al years’ time, compressing years into seconds. The results are beautiful, awesome, shocking, and frightening.
As I write, corporate and govern ment spokespeople, meeting at the UN climate conference in Doha, Qatar, are putting generations, not to men tion planet earth’s, future at risk by not ruling for immediate action to halt this world menace.
The UN weather agency warned at the talks that an area of Arctic sea ice bigger than the United States melt ed this year, and that ice cover had reached “a new record low” in the area around the North Pole.
Nathan Hultman, Brookings Insti tution climate policy expert, told the conference, regarding Hurricane San dy, “[That] demonstrated to a large part of the country that we are cer tainly vulnerable to the kind of events we might see under climate change.”
Change “might” to “will.” n leveling villages is ludicrous. The position of women in rural Pakistan can only be advanced by the total overturn of the rule of feudal elites in the countryside. Yousufzai knew this—she was fighting for the right to an education, crucial to breaking the stranglehold of feudal relations of production over rural women.
People in the United States have a critical role to play; we must halt the drone war, which only pro vides a more fertile recruiting ground for reactionary groups. We must end support for the military bureau cracy that serves to preserve the feudal hierarchy and prevent the wealth of the nation from being directed towards education and empowerment.
We must end the neoliberal world order, expressed through the World Bank and the IMF, which keeps the country in perpetual debt slavery, immiserates the lives of ordinary workers, and consolidates the control of an unaccountable military, agricultural, and indus trial elite. n